the spiritual life of man. When we fix our minds on life as the goal and depth and fulness of life as the criterion, we come out at once into the clear light where high inspirations are born and justified. But it is not only the conception of life as existing for pleasure that I think a true ethics will repudiate. We must clear our minds of the idea that life has any goal outside itself—pleasure, moral discipline, or what not. We must fully realize the conception of life as its own goal, its own complete satisfaction and justification. Whoever has done this will feel as if he had escaped from a jungle of contradiction and gloom, where man can only live at all by clearing some little space for his church and his homestead, and giving up the rest to the powers of darkness. Yet a step brings him to a point of view from which the physical, the animal and the human features of the world’s vast landscape seem to flow into a happy and organic union, where every part becomes luminous with meaning and charged with divine purpose. Moral action then, I conceive, as a _certain kind_ of life-promoting action. It is action which promotes life in the whole as opposed to the part, which sacrifices the lower, narrower, more immediate life for the fuller, nobler, more permanent life, whenever they are found to clash. It does not differ in kind from other wholesome vital action, but it differs in the heightening, the saliency, the intention conferred upon it by the circumstances under which it is taken. And if we ask how it was evolved in man, the answer is that it was there already in the instincts of the lower animals, which are never, as man often so sadly is, at odds with their true functions and duties. It is not morality which has been evolved in man, but the capacity for immorality, due to his personal self-consciousness. The ultimate question, then, as regards the abstract morality of any act or class of acts must be, Does it make for life? Does it tend to help man towards the maximum development _of all his faculties and capacities_? These faculties and capacities are what the universe has now evolved at the highest level of which we have any knowledge. None of them is evil, except in so far as it may thwart and stunt the development of others. In the harmony of the whole range of man’s powers of sense and spirit lies the golden ideal which none of us may realize, but for which each of us may strive; or—for such is the supreme and fatal prerogative of man—which he may set himself to dishonour and deny. CHAPTER IX THE ETHICAL SANCTION “Far, far, how far? from o’er the gates of Birth, The faint horizons, all the bounds of earth.” Tennyson.